The Most Expensive Part of Design Might Not Be the Design
Over the years, I’ve had the same conversation with clients many times. There is a product idea, an initial brief, a budget and usually a very real deadline. We start by discussing the development process, and when we get to research and analysis, I often hear the same question: do we really need this, or can we skip this stage and move directly into design?
I understand the question. When you already have an idea and believe you understand the problem, research can easily look like an additional expense before the “real” work begins. Concepts, CAD, prototypes — these are tangible things. You can see progress. Research is less visible, and when the development budget is limited, it can seem like an obvious place to save money.
After more than 25 years working in product development, I’ve become very cautious about that decision. The problem is not that a client’s brief is wrong. Usually, it contains a huge amount of valuable knowledge about the business, the product and the market. The problem begins when we assume that the brief contains everything we need to know. For me, a brief has always been the beginning of a project, not the conclusion. It tells us what we know today, but good research helps us discover what we don’t know yet. And very often, that second part is where the real opportunity is. Perhaps users are solving the problem differently from what we expected. Perhaps competitors are all following the same product architecture simply because that is how the category has evolved. Perhaps a new technology, material or manufacturing process allows us to approach the problem differently. Perhaps the proposed product is technically achievable but makes no sense at the required retail price.
Sometimes the research confirms almost everything in the original brief, which is also a good outcome. We can move forward with more confidence. But sometimes it leads to a more uncomfortable and much more valuable question: are we actually designing the right product? I find this particularly interesting because I work on both sides of design — in professional product development and in design education.
In academia, we teach different approaches to research: qualitative and quantitative methods, interviews, observation, surveys, case studies, experimentation, prototyping and practice-based research. Students are encouraged to investigate broadly, question assumptions and support their conclusions with evidence. Those principles don’t suddenly disappear when we enter professional practice. If anything, the responsibility becomes greater because someone is investing real money into the decisions we make.
What changes is the environment.
In industry, we work within real budgets and timeframes. There are suppliers waiting for information, engineers developing components, manufacturers preparing quotations and businesses planning launches. We cannot research every subject endlessly, nor should we. This is why I think analysis is just as important as research. I don’t judge the quality of research by the number of articles someone has read, the number of references on a board or the number of pages in a presentation. I care about the quality and relevance of the information and, most importantly, what we can do with it. Ten pages of relevant research can be far more valuable than a hundred pages of collected information. I have seen one conversation with a manufacturer change the material, geometry, assembly method and tooling strategy of a product. I have seen simple user observations reveal issues that were never mentioned in the original brief. I have seen competitor analysis open a completely different direction because suddenly it became obvious that everybody in the category was doing essentially the same thing. This is research too. It may not produce a beautiful 100-page document, but it can change a product. The important part is knowing what questions to ask, where to look for the answers and, eventually, when we know enough to make the next decision. This is also why I become concerned when research is removed from a project purely to reduce the initial development cost. In my experience, skipping research rarely removes the risk. More often, it moves that risk further down the development process, where mistakes become progressively more expensive. Changing direction when we are still defining the opportunity costs relatively little. Changing a concept later costs more. Changing engineered components costs more again. Once tooling, certification, packaging and production are involved, discovering that an assumption was wrong can become extremely painful. And after launch, it becomes a completely different conversation. But even an expensive engineering mistake is not necessarily the worst outcome. Most technical problems can eventually be solved. Components can be redesigned, materials changed and tooling modified. The harder problem is discovering that you have successfully designed, engineered, tooled and manufactured a product that people simply don’t want. That is a very expensive way to find out that the original assumption was wrong. For the same reason, I don’t see research as one isolated phase at the beginning of development. Research continues throughout a project, but the questions change. At the beginning, we may be investigating users, behaviour, competitors, the market and the business opportunity. As the project develops, the research becomes more technical: materials, manufacturing processes, ergonomics, components, suppliers, compliance, cost and testing. A prototype gives us new information. A supplier challenges an assumption. User testing exposes something we didn’t anticipate. Each of those findings feeds back into the design.
Research and design are not separate activities. They are part of the same development process. This thinking is fundamental to how we work at WOWME Design. When a client comes to us with a brief, we don’t see our job as simply turning that brief into sketches, CAD and eventually a manufactured object. We need to understand the thinking behind it, test the important assumptions and look beyond the boundaries of the initial request before significant money is committed to development. Sometimes that process tells us: yes, this is exactly the product we should make. Sometimes it changes the product. And occasionally it shows us that there is a much better opportunity sitting just outside the original brief. That, for me, is the real value of research. It is not about producing more information. It is about finding the right information at the right time, understanding what it means, and using it to make better decisions.
Research creates knowledge. Analysis creates direction. Design turns that direction into reality.
And sometimes, the most expensive part of design is discovering too late what we could have discovered at the beginning.
I’m curious to hear how others see this. Where does research sit in your design and development process — and have you ever seen a project pay the price for skipping it too early?
Comments